Is Ra's inspired by Kahn?

[Darkseid Is]

I watched Space Seed the other day. It's one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. Of course Wrath of Kahn came out much later than Ra's' introduction.

I'm thinking here's a sexy, middle eastern wold-dominating type of villain who is 100s of years old and just as cool and just as smart ask Kirk with the chest out and the flamboyance and arrogance who wants his superior people and a better world. Did Denny Oneal and Neal Adams watch Star Trek? I think it would be pretty cool.

[RickWJ324]

BAT KIRK.jpg

Could be!!

[BruceWayneJr.]

O'Neil claims he was subconsciously influenced by James Bond.

https://13thdimension.com/denny-onei...f-ras-al-ghul/

[K. Jones]

O'Neil claims he was subconsciously influenced by James Bond.

https://13thdimension.com/denny-onei...f-ras-al-ghul/

Influences are everywhere, inescapable, even by Mister Miracle.

It's more important to understand why iconography sticks around - typically, because it is apt.

Ra's al Ghul as a middle-eastern apolitical assassin lord eco-terrorist is apt, because our guy, Batman, is still a Western white billionaire C.E.O. - and if Batman was himself a Bond villain (which would be pretty easy to put together, actually - I mean he has a subterranean villainous lair and everything) - well, I guess what I'm saying is that unconsciously, Batman actually has more in common with a Bond villain than Bond himself, and so, even though he's our good guy, having a Bond villain as his villain was perhaps the only thing on the scale that scaled with Batman as far as influence goes. I mean in the 1970s, Joker and Riddler and Two-Face looked like pretty silly, middling foes for a guy who was on the Justice League.

[Arctic Cyclist]

Influences are everywhere, inescapable, even by Mister Miracle.

It's more important to understand why iconography sticks around - typically, because it is apt.

Ra's al Ghul as a middle-eastern apolitical assassin lord eco-terrorist is apt, because our guy, Batman, is still a Western white billionaire C.E.O. - and if Batman was himself a Bond villain (which would be pretty easy to put together, actually - I mean he has a subterranean villainous lair and everything) - well, I guess what I'm saying is that unconsciously, Batman actually has more in common with a Bond villain than Bond himself, and so, even though he's our good guy, having a Bond villain as his villain was perhaps the only thing on the scale that scaled with Batman as far as influence goes. I mean in the 1970s, Joker and Riddler and Two-Face looked like pretty silly, middling foes for a guy who was on the Justice League.

Khan, Ra's, Dr No, Blofield, SPECTRE, and most Bond villains take massive inspiration from Fu Manchu, both the books and the movies. O'Neil does get very evasive about that as some of the old Ra's al Ghul stories edge mighty close to some of the Fu Machu books. The interesting thing about the decision to make Ra's an unspecified extinct middle eastern ethnicity is that back in the late 60s early 70s when he was conceived and created terrorists from the Middle East weren't a thing. No one would have considered the implications unfortunate at the time as the US interferences during the Cold War that fed the extremists and created the current social and political climate in the Middle East hadn't taken effect yet. In 1971, no one would have predicted that religious extremism would be normalized, or that Middle Eastern terrorists would be a thing much less a global concern and threat. Environmental terrorists and extremists yes. Irish terrorists, heck yeah. Not so much Middle Easterners.

Speaking of Bond, there's another O'Neil interview on the same website as the aforementioned link where O'Neil basically admitted that he modeled Talia after Caroline Munro who was a Bond girl. Which makes me happy, because I remember watching The Spy Who Loved Me as a wee munchkin and wondering when Batman would show up because Talia was there. There was no convincing me otherwise to the amusement of my comic collecting kinfolk. And it's a damn shame we didn't get a Batman movie with her as Talia, because the current comic landscape would have been completely different.

But despite everything Adams and O'Neil say, anyone who's read the public domain Fu Manchu books will catch that Ra's is a very thinly veiled expy of the Devil Doctor. Both have an international crime organization, magic elixirs that extend his life, a beautiful daughter hopelessly in love with the hero and constantly betraying her father for him, and an obsession with the hero himself. One just happens to have been around since the 1920s and seeped so throughly into the public consciousness that most people don't realize how much of an impact he had.

*A side note: Batman as a Bond villain is brilliant. That's one of the finest and most accurate interpretations of him I've ever encountered.
**Fu Manchu has appeared as a foe of Batman's in Detective Comics. DC lost the rights to use him to Marvel in the late 60s. Ra's was created shortly thereafter, hence O'Neil being touchy and evasive about the connection.

[oasis1313]

I'd like to see a story arc for a Batman as villain theme.